• Numbers Tell Their Own Stories
• Hands-held vs. Hands-free
• Studies That Prove Dangers of Distracted Driving
• Programs That Rid of Potential Texting Dangers
• Life-Changing Decisions
• Works Cited

Is a Text Really Worth Dying For?

It was a warm, anticipated summer night for 21 year-olds, Brianna and Kim They were on their way to a party in Fairlawn, but didn’t expect to never arrive.

Brianna was driving along Route 4 in New Jersey with Kim in the passenger seat while quickly texting the host of the party to ask for directions. Before Brianna was able to realize that a pick-up truck from the other side of the highway attempted to make an illegal U-turn into her lane, she T-boned the car, killing herself and ejecting Kim about 25 feet.

Over the past decade, driving while texting (DWT) has evolved from a progressing problem into a fatal issue. Although DWT is banned in 23 states and the District of Columbia thus far including New Jersey, it is still a common daily activity that claims the lives of thousands of people each year. Since it hasn’t secured its own place on crash reports yet and usually isn’t reported as the reasoning for accidents, it generally falls under the category of distracted driving.

Distracted driving is any non-driving activity a person engages in that increases the risk of crashing. Activities such as talking and/or texting on the phone, eating or drinking and reading are included within this definition, but studies are showing that texting while driving poses the greatest threat.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), there are three different types of distraction that can occur while driving: visual, manual and cognitive. Visual distraction is when you take your eyes off of the road, manual distraction is when you physically remove your hands from the wheel and cognitive distraction is when you’re mentally focusing on other things rather than driving. Cognitively speaking, driving while using a cell phone reduces the amount of brain activity associated with driving by 37 percent.

DWT encompasses all three types of distraction at the same time, which is why it poses such a large problem.

Along with distracting driving, texting also presents communication issues in today’s society. With the new texting era, youths are essentially losing their ability to communicate. Since DWT significantly impacts the younger generation, prevalently ages 15-20 where distraction is the number one cause of teen drivers’ crashes, these youths are growing up without the “essential communication skills,” according to Director of the New Jersey Division of Highway Traffic Safety, Pam Fischer.

“Not only is this a problem from a public safety standpoint, but also from a societal standpoint,” Fischer said. “We’re losing the ability to truly communicate. You know, it’s an art form to have a conversation, and it’s scary to think that we’re losing the ability to do so.”

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Numbers Tell Their Own Stories

Car accidents still remain the leading cause of death for 15-20 year-olds From 1997 through 2006, more than 63,000 youths ages 15-20 died in car accidents. This panned out to be about 122 teenagers each week.

Although all of these accidents weren’t a direct result of distracted driving, a new study conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) in 2008 proved that cell phone usage was aiding in the increasing numbers of deaths on the road. The Institute surveyed 1,219 drivers 18 and older during the last two months of 2009. Among the drivers who admitted to cell phone use, the study found that cell phone use while driving could account for twenty two percent of all crashes, or about 1.3 million in 2008.

In 2008 alone, over 37,000 people were killed in car accidents; of those drivers, about 5,500, or roughly eleven percent, were killed as a result of distraction, according to NHTSA. Drivers 20 and under were found to be the age group with the largest proportion of distracted drivers accounting for 16 percent of all fatal crashes involving distraction. This number steadily increased from 12 percent in 2004.

This act of distraction also accounted for over half of a million injuries in accidents. The number of people injured accounted for twenty-two percent of all people injured in motor vehicle accidents that year.

Aside from deaths and injuries involving distracted driving, NHTSA’s research also displays that teen drivers engage in cell phone use tasks more frequently than adults and are four times more likely to get into a crash or a near crash event.

Supporting the NHTSA’s data, the IIHS study found that younger drivers were more apt to admit to cell phone use while driving opposed to older drivers. Drivers 30 and younger spent sixteen percent of their driving time on the phone compared to the 7 percent of drivers 30-59 and 2.5 percent of drivers 60 and older.

Fischer explained how she receives clusters of e-mails everyday that pass through the Governor or Attorney Generals’ Offices asking why the laws aren’t being enforced with cell phones and driving. She enthusiastically replied without hesitation, “We are!”

“Since March 1, 2008, when the primary law took effect until this past March 31, 2010, police officers have issued 243,032 tickets. That’s about 10,000 tickets each month,” Fischer said. “You know, there’s only so many police officers on the road, but the fact that they’re doing something about it, you bet your bottom dollar that it certainly is helping. If one or two people get a ticket, they will tell their friends, ‘Hey, they really are enforcing the law,’ so it does have an impact.”

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Hands-held vs. Hands-free

As of 2010, seven states including the District of Columbia ban hand-held phone use. However, each states’ laws differ from another when it comes to phone usage. In 2007, the amount of people using hand-held cell phones rose to 6 percent, an increase from 2006. This percentage translated into 1,005,000 cars on the road at any given time between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. that were being operated by a driver who was using a hand-held device.

This also translated into about eleven percent of cars in this time period whose driver was using either a hand-held or hands-free device.

In New Jersey, Director Fischer began to find that people believe hands-free is safer than hand-held, but proved the assumption wrong.

“It’s not so much about holding the device, it’s about the mental and visual distractions that are going on. The visual, of course, being the failure to scan the road and the cognitive, where our mind is focused on processing the information coming into our ear and not so much as what’s happening in our environment,” Fischer said. “Your eyes and mind have lost touch with the idea of driving. Driving has become the secondary activity and talking is the primary activity, so hands-free is not safer.”

She also statistically denied the fact that hands-free is any safer than hands-held.

“When you look at the crash reports here in New Jersey there’s not a huge difference between hand-held and hands-free crashes,” Fischer said. “In 2008 and 2009, there were 3,600 hand-held cell phone crashes, opposed to 3,100 hands-free. And, as a result of those crashes 1,500 people were injured because of hand-held cell phone use, while 1,400 were injured due to hands-free phone use.”

New Jersey is one of the several states that bans both hands-held phone use and DWT, but doesn’t compare to two other states that have enacted laws even further. In Utah, the use of a hand-held phone has been considered a careless driving offense when committing another moving violation. Along with Utah, Maine has pushed to resolve this issue by considering the act a traffic infraction.

The Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI) also found in their infamous study on distracted driving that hands-free use is no safer than hands-held use. They ruled out the assumptions due to the inattention to the road; when answering, dialing and typing on a cell phone, your eyes are required to be off of the road, which is the primary risk associated with cell phone use.

The IIHS survey also found that only twenty nine percent of drivers in states with hand-held bans who were aware of the bans and twenty two percent of drivers in states with texting bans who were aware of the restrictions felt they were strongly enforced. This ties in with Fischer’s explanation of the problem in the New Jersey about the laws actually being enforced. Since people aren’t seeing dramatic results, they believe nothing is being done, so they continue to engage in dangerous and life threatening acts behind the wheel.

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Studies That Prove Dangers of Distracted Driving

Although all age groups have admitted to DWT, the younger generation of drivers lead the dangerous decision-making, as many studies have proven. One notable study that aided in President Obama’s decision to propose the ALERT Drivers Act of 2009 was the distracted driving study mentioned above by the VTTI.

In 2009, VTTI installed several sophisticated cameras and instrumentation in the participants’ personal vehicles to observe drivers under real-world conditions; participants included light vehicle drivers and truck drivers. These studies observed drivers for more than 6 million miles of driving.

The study found that texting while driving was associated with the highest risk of all other cell phone related tasks. Talking/listening increased the risk for light vehicle drivers, but radically increased the risk for truck drivers.

Drivers of light vehicles were almost 3 times more likely to crash if they were dialing a phone, 1.3 times more likely if they were talking/listening to a cell phone and 1.4 times more likely if they were reaching for an object (usually an electronic device).

On the extreme other hand, truck drivers were literally holding their lives in their own hands when using cell phones while driving. Heavy vehicles and trucks were almost 6 times more likely to crash while dialing a phone, 1 time more likely while talking/listening to a cell phone and almost 7 times more likely when reaching for an electronic device.

However, the shocking statistics were revealed when observing DWT in heavy vehicles and trucks. Texting makes these drivers over 23 times more likely to crash. VTTI also discovered that DWT had the longest duration of time that people’s eyes were off of the road; when sending/reading a text message, VTTI showed that the driver’s eyes were off of the road for 4.6 seconds over a 6 second interval. This equates to that driver traveling the length of a football field at 55 mph without looking at the road once.

VTTI has also conducted several other studies to prove the negative impact driver inattention has on drivers and traffic accidents that occur.

Although two years earlier in 2007, another simulated-study on distracted driving was conducted at Clemson University. The researchers in Clemson’s psychology department found that using electronic devices while driving, specifically cell phones and iPods, caused drivers to leave their lanes 10 percent more. The study also supported that drivers who talked on their cell phones were unable to keep their cars from changing lanes. When texting and driving, drivers crossed the center lane or left their lane in all about 10 percent more often.

Along with the VTTI and Clemson studies, Fischer mentioned another study conducted by the University of Utah that gauged a person’s ability to multi-task. Recently in 2010, Jason Watson and David Strayer, psychologists at the University of Utah, assembled a group of 200 undergraduates and asked them to perform a simulated driving test as well as a standardized memory test that involved math and word memorization. First, each of the students performed the tasks separately then simultaneously. For the multitasking portion of the experiment, researchers asked the volunteers to complete a verbal version of the memory test on a hands-free cell phone while driving in a simulator.

The simulation lasted for about and hour and a half and displayed that ninety seven and a half percent of the participants showed a significant decrease in their driving ability and memory while multitasking. However, the study showed that only 2.5 percent of people are “super-taskers.” The psychologists define these super-taskers as people who are fully capable of multitasking while driving, and in some cases, even perform better while multitasking and driving.

Fischer believes that this newly generated idea of multitasking is doing anything but helping drivers pass time, especially with the amount of people who are driving while using cell phones.

“People are viewing time in the car as “wasted time, so we’re moving into this whole mindset of multi-tasking and we’re really putting our safety at risk,” Fischer said. “Driving is pretty complex. You’ve got to have all of your faculties about you to do it (making split second decisions, etc.) and when you interject another activity into that environment, we’re multi-tasking and we don’t do it very well. Whatever environment we’re in, we need to be it in 100%.”

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Programs That Rid of Potential Texting Dangers

DWT has been proven to be a serious issue and fatal problem that’s progressively worsening, so many companies have created programs to try and prevent the disease from spreading. There are numerous programs that can be activated in a car, at all costs, that will automatically shut off the phone upon movement or disallow the driver from using their cell phone while driving at a certain speed.

These systems have been targeted towards GPS-capable smart phones such as BlackBerrys and Androids, but are currently being worked on to access other phones as well. Programs such as iZUP and ZoomSafer block outgoing calls and texts, send incoming calls to voicemail and hold incoming texts until the car stops. Zoomsafer is more technologically savvy since it sends auto replies via Facebook, Twitter or email that says the person is driving. Another program advertised widely online, Textecution , blocks texts from a driver’s phone while the car is moving and requires permission from a system administrator, such as a parent, to override it.

Along with these GPS-targeted phone programs, others such as CellControl and Guardian Angel MP combine blocking software for phones with a small device that plugs into the car’s onboard computer. These programs use Bluetooth to transmit speed and other data to the driver’s phone. The system administrators of these specific programs are able to customize settings to block any calls, texts and emails once the car reaches a certain speed.

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Life-Changing Decisions

Although all age groups have admitted to DWT, the younger generation of drivers lead the dangerous decision-making, as many studies have proven. One notable study that aided in President Obama’s decision to propose the ALERT Drivers Act of 2009 was the distracted driving study mentioned above by the VTTI.

Many people have been both directly and indirectly affected by distracted drivers. DWT has accounted for a large mass of distracted driving and its effects and continues to increase each day.

Despite how they’ve been affected, many people despise the idea of DWT and believe that it should be stopped as soon as it can be, especially Kim, as mentioned in the beginning. After becoming a product of someone else’s careless mistakes and being ejected 25 feet from a car, she is lucky to have survived such a crash.

However, since she was in critical condition at the time of the accident, she had to be airlifted to a specialized trauma center in Bergen County where her whole face had to be re-constructed. This should serve as an eye-opener to people who don’t believe it can happen to them. Although Kim was never texting herself, the fact that Brianna was while driving has changed her whole life. From now on, she will never be the same.

“It comes down to recognizing that one of the most public things we do is drive. We may think we’re doing it in the privacy of our own cars, but the actions you take and the decisions you make behind the wheel are very public and have a ripple effect,” Fischer said. “Texting and talking on cell phones can effect other people; say you get in an accident that involves texting, now that other person has become a part of your life The message goes beyond the guy behind the wheel.”

Heather Fiore is a journalism major at Rider University with a News-Editorial track.  She hopes to work for a magazine or prestigious newspaper after graduation, preferably in New York City.

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Works Cited

Brooks, Johnell O., and Ross Norton. “Study measures danger of driving while texting.” Clemson University Newsroom . Clemson University, 31 Dec. 2007. Web. 22 Apr. 2010. http://www.clemson.edu/newsroom/articles/2008/january/driving_texting.php5

United States. National Conference of State Legislatures. Cell Phones and Highway Safety: 2006 State Legislative Update . By Matt Sundeen. 1-22. National Conference of State Legislatures . N.p., Mar. 2007. Web. 22 Apr. 2010. http://www.cellphonefreedriving.ca

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. An Examination of Driver Distraction as Recorded in NHYSA Databases . Washington: National Center for Statistics and Analysis, 2009. 1-12. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration . Web. 22 Apr. 2010. www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/CATS/index.aspx

National Transportation Safety Board. Most Wanted Transportation Safety Improvement State Issues . National Transportation Safety Board . N.p., Nov. 2008.

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